


The Bad Thing

by Edonohana



Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King
Genre: Dreams and Nightmares, Gen, Oy POV
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-09
Updated: 2020-02-09
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:40:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22592665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edonohana/pseuds/Edonohana
Summary: There was a bad thing in the woods. Oy could smell it.
Relationships: Roland Deschain & Eddie Dean & Susannah Dean & Jake Chambers & Oy
Comments: 13
Kudos: 26
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 5





	The Bad Thing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scioscribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/gifts).



> See end notes for warnings.

There was a bad thing in the woods. Oy could smell it. 

The scent was faint, the barest whiff of rot and bitterness drifting up from the path at their backs. Not something they were going toward. Something coming toward them.

Oy yipped an alert and nosed Jake’s ankle. 

“What is it?” Jake asked.

But Oy didn’t know what it was. He just knew it was bad. He whined uncertainly, and Jake picked him up and fed him a bit of cold venison. Oy snapped up the meat, cuddled up against the warmth of Jake’s chest, and licked his throat and face, making the boy laugh. Oy liked it when Jake laughed. 

He could still smell the bad thing, but it stayed behind them. Maybe they were in its territory. Maybe it only intended to follow them until they left, like a stalking cat or the gray slime thing. 

But it worried him that the rest of his pack hadn’t noticed it, not even Roland. Jake and Eddie and Susannah had missed the gray slime thing, but Roland hadn’t. And even when Roland hid his reactions from the others, Oy could tell where his attention was directed. It was like the path they followed, a subtle bending of the landscape in a certain direction. 

The bad thing was still trailing them when the sun sank low and the pack began to set up camp. Oy thought of trying again to alert them, but he didn’t know how to explain or even if he should try. The bad thing wasn’t coming any closer, and they were building a fire. Maybe it would be better to be stopped with heat and light than to keep walking in the cold and the dark with the bad thing at their backs.

Oy stayed by the fire rather than going off to hunt. He wasn’t going to leave Jake. He wasn’t going to leave any of them. He had to protect them from the bad thing that he still couldn’t see or hear but could only smell in whiffs of soft decay and sharp bitterness, like an abandoned and rotting poison bait.

Jake fed him venison from his hand. Oy ate and licked his fingers clean, then jerked his head up. The scent was becoming stronger, but uncannily, it was also becoming more diffuse. While they were walking, he could have at least indicated that it was behind them; now it seemed to be all around them.

He had to warn his pack.

Oy knew some human words, especially the ones they used often: shoot, dinner, camp, walk; yes, no, danger, love. He could also catch the general sense of what they said even if he knew none of the words, through a word whose sound he didn’t know but whose meaning he understood very well indeed: _khef._

But most human words flowed through his ears and out again, vanishing from his mind seconds after they were spoken. If he wanted to say one he didn’t already know by heart, he had to echo it almost as soon as he heard it, or it would be gone. 

Oy nudged Jake and barked sharply.

“What is it, Oy?” Jake asked again.

“It!” Oy replied. 

“Well, that’s certainly not ominous in any way,” Eddie remarked, glancing about uneasily.

“Roland?” Susannah asked. “Can you hear anything? See anything?”

“No,” said Roland. “But if Oy senses—”

The scent of the bad thing rolled over them in a reek strong enough to make Oy gag. He coughed and sneezed, his eyes watering. 

When he opened them again, the odor of the bad thing was gone. So was their camp. So were the woods.

So was his pack.

He was alone in an alley in a place full of tall buildings and people and metal things rushing around. It was like Lud, except there were many sounds all competing instead of one dominant beat and everything else in the background. It had more smells than Lud, too: dog and cat and bird and human and meat and dirt and weeds and grease and a bitter rot that seemed familiar... 

Then he caught the fresh clean scent of Jake, like a fast-moving creek, and his heart swelled with love and relief. He trotted out from the shadows and began making his way along the hard gray ground, slipping past humans and dogs on leashes and rolling carts, keeping a wary eye out for predators and other dangers.

A billy-bumbler slunk out from under a stationary cart, blocking Oy’s path. Her gold-ringed eyes glared into his.

Oy froze, unable to move forward or back. He remembered her. They had been in a pack once, before…

More billy-bumblers began creeping out from under the cart, their soft paws noiseless on the hard ground. They were the bumblers from his old pack; he knew them by sight and smell and the _khef_ -like sense that animals have. They’d had names, once, some given by humans and some by each other: Aya and En-ye, Holdfast and Cavall. But they’d forgotten their names as they’d first forgotten human words and then their own, as the world moved on. 

They kept crawling out, eyes gleaming, silent. More and more of them, his pack and other packs, all the billy-bumblers he’d ever known. Had Jake or Eddie or Susannah witnessed this sight, they might have thought of a nightmare clown car, for there were far more than could possibly have fitted under the cart. But Oy, who had never seen a circus and didn’t know what a car was, had a spatial awareness that surpassed that of most humans and matched that of gunslingers, and he knew that it was _wrong._

He remembered well why he’d been driven from his old pack, and how it had taken all his strength and speed and wits to avoid being torn to pieces. But seeing them—seeing _her_ , his littermate—he couldn’t help himself.

“Iri-ay,” Oy called out. It was her name, or had been her name. In the tongue of the billy-bumblers, it meant Grub Finder. 

The billy-bumbler who had once been Iri-ay opened her mouth and hissed at him in a wordless, meaningless sibilance. Then she sprang for his throat.

He turned and fled for his life, his lungs heaving, his heart aching. He darted and dodged the snarling, hissing pack behind him, but he ran toward as well as away. Oy had been on his way to find Jake, and he didn’t stray from that path. Jake would help him, Jake would save him, Jake would pick him up and hold him close and speak his name.

Jake’s freshwater scent led Oy to a dark hole in the ground. He could see no bottom to the pit, but he could scent Jake somewhere below. And not only Jake. The rest of his pack—his now-pack, his true-pack—were down there somewhere, all of them: Eddie’s sweet warm aroma like earth and wood, Susannah’s crisp sharp scent like grass and steel, and Roland’s smell of gunsmoke, old leather, and sun-touched stone. 

Oy yelped in pain as sharp teeth slashed at his side. But it was love more than fear than spurred him on as he leaped into the pit. 

He landed on a hard cold surface, rolled head over heels, and fetched up against a hard cold wall. Bruised and battered, the wound in his side matting his fur with blood, he scrabbled to his feet. 

He’d fallen into a vast underground room. By the flickering, buzzing white lights overhead, Oy could see a filthy stone floor sliced by a straight-edged, flat-bottomed ravine. The ravine had straight raised rails of steel running along its bottom, and vanished into blackness at both ends. Objects were scattered amidst the rails: charred wood, a shattered blue plate, a heap of tiny clear cylinders with silver needles attached at one end. 

People stood and squatted and lay on the stone on either side of the ravine. The place smelled of unwashed bodies and urine and a whiff of bitterness and decay, but the scents of his pack stood out strong and vivid as muffin-balls growing amidst a mulch of dead leaves and earth. 

Jake and Roland stood on opposite sides of the ravine, right at the edge of the drop. They seemed to be staring at each other, but as Oy crept closer, he saw that their eyes were glazed and drifting. 

“There was a boy. There wasn’t a boy,” Roland was muttering, over and over and over.

“I’m dead. I’m not,” Jake was muttering, over and over and over.

Oy whined uncertainly. Jake was on the opposite side of the ravine from him. It was too far for Oy to jump; too far even for Jake, unless Roland were to lean out and catch him. And the ravine was too deep and its sides too steep for Oy to climb out if he jumped in.

Susannah too was at the edge of the ravine, on the same side as Roland. She lay on the dirty floor, bruised and bleeding, with her arms tied at the wrists and stretched out in front of her. Her wheelchair was nowhere in sight, and her eyes had a strange light in them.

“Blue plate’s got a sharp edge. Could cut these ropes,” she said, then, in a completely difference voice, “No! No! Blue plate’s forspecial!”

Across the ravine, Eddie sat, thin and pale and vacant-eyed, beside a man who looked much like him but for the shattered, bloody wreck of his knee. They each had a silver needle in their arms.

“Ake!” Oy barked. “Olan!”

But he was drowned out by a sound like the growling of his nameless pack. It came closer and closer, until he could see the growling thing glowing a sickly pink in the darkness, like raw flesh. It rushed toward them, filling the entire ravine. The thing had a mouth but no eyes, and it was smiling.

Time stretched like sinew. Oy saw and heard and understood everything that happened in the eternal instant moment before it was upon them.

The billy-bumblers who had once been his pack were leaping down through the hole, landing with heavy thuds, hissing and snarling without words or understanding. They were coming for him, the nameless ones.

The man with the smashed knee quietly slumped, dead where he sat. Eddie didn’t notice, head nodding, eyes glazed.

“Got to get free,” Susannah muttered, stretching her bound arms down into the ravine, reaching for the broken plate. 

“That’s the door!” Jake leaned out across the ravine, arms outstretched. He lost his balance, teetering at the brink. As he began to fall, he screamed at Roland, “Catch me!”

Roland’s wiry muscles tensed to leap, to catch Jake and carry them both across to safety… 

… but as the pink thing roared toward them, toothy jaws stretched wide enough to devour man and boy in a single gulp, Roland jerked backward. 

Oy lunged forward, meaning to jump for Jake, but the bumblers caught him with tooth and claw. As they began to rip him apart, he saw Jake falling into the path of the grinning pink thing, saw it rip away Susannah’s arms, saw Eddie glance at the dead man beside him and open his mouth to scream, saw the pink thing rush away and Roland look down into the ravine at what it had left behind.

Oy wanted to cry out his pain and horror and grief, but there were too many furry bodies on him, covering and smothering him, blotting out words and sight and life. 

At the peak of his agony, everything went away: the pain, the pressure, the screaming, the smell of blood and rot and bitterness. 

Oy crouched unhurt in an alley in a place full of tall buildings and people and rolling carts. 

Confused and shaken, he sniffed the air. There was Jake. And there was another scent that stirred at his memory, an odor of bitter decay. Someone had poisoned a carcass, then left it to rot.

Oy remembered his previous arrival in the city and the underground room with hideous clarity, but had only a cloudy sense of what had happened before that. He’d been with his pack, around a fire, and… they’d fallen asleep? Was he dreaming? Were they all dreaming together?

Whatever was happening, he didn’t want to encounter the wordless, nameless pack again. Rather than going directly toward Jake, he set off in the opposite direction, making a wide circle. This time he ran full-tilt, not bothering to try to escape attention. He wanted to catch Jake before he fell.

Oy expected to come to the hole again, but from another direction. Instead, he found Jake standing outside a building, his hand stretched out toward the door, talking to himself.

“I’ll open the door, and feel sunlight and dry air. The door goes to the waystation. That is the truth.” Jake’s hand brushed against the doorknob, and he snatched it back as if it had burned him. “The door is locked, and that is the truth. It’ll never be ajar. There was never any gunslinger.”

Oy gave a sharp bark. Jake glanced down at him. Oy’s heart leaped as Jake bent down to pat him, then sank as he saw no recognition in his eyes. “Go home, doggie. One way or another, I’m bound somewhere you wouldn’t like.”

Jake opened the door, and let out a disappointed groan at the sight of a dimly lit flight of stairs. He started to turn away, but Oy caught some other scents from down below. Leaping inside, he turned and said, “Ome!”

“It’s just a subway station,” said Jake.

“Ome!” Oy repeated. He went down a few steps, then looked entreatingly at Jake, wagging his tail.

Jake went inside, smiling a little, and petted Oy. The door swung shut behind them. Jake turned, glancing doubtfully at it. “ _Now_ it might be the door to the waystation.”

Oy wasn’t going to let him get stuck at the door again. He seized Jake’s pant leg in his jaws and tugged hard, backing down the steps, forcing Jake to step with him or fall.

“Stop that, you…” He looked more closely at Oy. “You’re not a dog. A raccoon? I didn’t know raccoons lived down here.”

“Ere!” Oy barked, running a little way down ahead of Jake. “Ake, ere!”

“And they don’t talk… But dogs don’t talk either. Do they?” Jake took a slow step forward. And another. 

Susannah’s scent grew sharper as they came toward a knot of people half-blocking the wide stone steps and talking loudly. Oy didn’t know the words and he had no _khef_ with them, but the meaning was clear nonetheless. The voices were cruel, meant to slash and mangle.

Susannah lay with her hands tightly bound at the wrists and a wad of cloth stuffed into her mouth. She was struggling, her eyes filled with fury and terror, but she could do nothing but swing out her arms like a club and whip her neck around to try to strike them with her skull. The mob was kicking her down the steps, dodging her blows and laughing.

“Stop that!” Jake shouted.

He plunged into the crowd, punching and kicking. Oy joined him, biting and clawing. Once he got near Susannah, he jerked the cloth from her mouth with his teeth, and then she used hers on any ankles within range.

The crowd ran away up the stairs, shouting viciously over their shoulders. Jake crouched beside Susannah and untied her wrists. 

“Thanks, sugar,” she said. 

“I’m glad I found you,” he said, then looked puzzled. Oy could sense him briefly grasping at the double meaning to his words, though Oy could also see that they didn’t recognize each other. “What the hell was wrong with those people?”

Susannah shrugged, luxuriously stretching out her body and cracking her neck. “That’s just what white folk do. I snuck out to steal some water, and they caught me.”

“To steal _water_?” Jake asked, incredulous. “Why would you need to?”

“To live, sugar. You think we can survive on air?” Then, seeing his blank look, she said, “Only white folk are allowed to buy things. Anything we need, we have to beg or steal or scavenge. Eat scraps from trash. Drink water from puddles. Where you from that you don’t know that?”

“New York,” said Jake. 

“This is New York,” Susannah said. “You must be from somewhere else.”

Oy ran down the steps and looked back, barking urgently, “You! Omewhere else!”

Susannah and Jake glanced at each other, then spoke at once, Susannah saying, “I think we should follow him,” and Jake saying, embarrassed, “I don’t think I can carry you…”

She laughed. “I can go faster than you, now that you’ve got my arms free.”

Susannah slithered down the steps on her belly in a fluid motion, alternately pulling and slowing herself with her hands. Oy ran, using his speed to challenge her to keep up, hoping Jake would feel challenged to keep up with her. 

The three of them arrived at the underground place quickly, breathless and giddy. They were now on the same side of the ravine as Eddie and the man with the smashed knee. Roland stood across from them, his faded blue eyes staring off into the distance.

“Eddie!” Oy barked. “Olan!”

Some of the dazedness cleared from Roland’s gaze. Slowly, he said, “Do I know you?”

“I o you,” Oy repeated. He clawed the needle out of Eddie’s arm. “I o you!” Spinning to gaze at Susannah and Jake, in the last moment before the sounds slipped from his mind, he barked, “I o you!”

“I do too,” said Roland, recognition lighting his face. “I know you very well.”

And with that, the knowing came to them all. Oy felt that in _khef_ even as the last missing piece, the memory of the bad thing, came to him.

“Oy!” Jake dropped to his knees, sweeping Oy up in his arms. Oy wagged his tail, his entire hindquarters following, and licked his face. 

Eddie and Susannah hugged each other tight, and then opened their arms to pull in Jake and Oy. 

“Come on, Roland,” Susannah called. “Don’t want to miss out!” 

A rumbling started. Roland glanced into the darkness, then leaped the chasm as swiftly and surely as he could draw his guns. As his worn boots thudded onto stone, the pink thing careened past, its grin twisted into a snarl of fury at losing its prey.

“We’re still here,” Susannah said when the rumbling stopped. “Isn’t the spell supposed to break once we know we’re enchanted?”

“It’s not a spell. It’s a... a creature, you could call it. We need to find it.” Roland scanned the area, then shook his head. “I don’t know what’s an illusion drawn from our fears, and what’s the creature that feeds on them. It could look like anything.”

“Oy sensed it before,” Jake said.

Roland nodded, his face grim. “I hope he can sense it here. Where is it, Oy?”

Oy sniffed the air. The smell of bitterness and rot clung to the dead man with the smashed knee and the needle in his arm. He jumped out of Jake’s arms and pointed with a paw. “Ere!”

“Henry?” Eddie said.

“That’s not Henry,” Roland said urgently. “Everyone, draw and fire!”

“I don’t have my gun,” Jake said. “None of us do.”

He was right. Jake and Eddie and Susannah lacked even their holsters, and Roland’s was empty.

The bad thing, which was starting to look less and less like a man, seemed to gather itself to spring. 

“Now!” Roland shouted. “Draw and fire!”

His movement was so familiar that Oy could almost see the gun in his hand, though there was nothing there. As one, the others drew nothing, and fired nothing. 

The empty air thundered in their hands. 

Oy blinked, startled. They were back in the forest. Jake and Susannah and Roland and Eddie were all firing their guns at a thing that was dissolving into nothingness too quickly to be seen. But its scent was so thick that Oy could sense its contours and edges, the places where it was most present and where it trailed off to ragged wisps and nothingness. It had the form of a human, roughly, but with no head nor hands nor feet, only billows and trails of foul scent.

And then it was gone. 

“What was that thing?” Jake asked shakily.

“A nightmare-eater,” Roland said. “It traps people inside dreams, and feeds on their pain and fear until there’s nothing left of them.”

“I’ve heard of nightmare-eaters,” Susannah said. “They’re a myth from our world. But ours are friendly. They eat nightmares so we don’t have them.”

“Welcome to Mid-World,” said Eddie. “Where the nightmare-eaters eat you.”

“Where’d you hear about them, Susannah?” asked Jake.

“I saw a painting of one at the Met,” she replied. “A furry little critter like Oy, but with an elephant’s trunk. They’re called baku.”

“Perhaps that was what our nightmare eaters were once, before the world moved on,” said Roland.

“Or maybe Mid-World’s baku evolved into billy-bumblers,” said Jake. “Susannah, you said it looked like Oy. And he was the only one of us who seemed to know what was going on.”

“You may be right,” Roland said to Jake. Then he bent his head and said, “You saved us, Oy. I thank you.”

And then they were all stroking him, taking away the last vestiges of the grief and pain and terror of the nightmare-eater’s dream. 

_Pack,_ Oy thought, and didn’t have to say the word to be understood.

**Author's Note:**

> Contains temporary character death in a dream state. But they all end up okay.


End file.
